A Written Record of Personal Self-Improvement

Why I Am a Toastmaster

I’ve mentioned before about the Toastmasters organization, which is made up of local clubs and a hierarchy thereof. Toastmasters is all about personal professional development. There are two basic tracks to work on:

Becoming a better speaker.

Becoming a better leader.

Participating in a club develops both aspects. When you are the Toastmaster of the Day (TMOD), you have to get the meeting together ahead of time, which means coming up with a theme for the meeting, coordinating roles, gathering introductions, and making sure everyone knows what’s going on before the meeting starts. Once the meeting has begun, you run the show. Toastmasters meetings are supposed to have an agenda and time is something that should be carefully watched. This sometimes means having to keep the meeting moving in gentle, but instructive ways. This is just one example of how Toastmasters develops leadership.

Toastmasters is more well known for helping with public speaking. There are plenty of tales of how folks who were terrified of speaking overcame that fear and became accomplished speakers. I’ve seen that example in my own club. I can think of a particular gentleman who had to give a short technical presentation to our customers years ago. He froze up. It was extremely painful to watch. However, after participating in Toastmasters for a couple of years, he came into his own with regards to public speaking. About three years after that first event, he had to give another presentation to the same audience. He opened with a funny joke and proceeded to give an excellent overview of an initiative we were undertaking. That’s what helped me see the value in Toastmasters and it is one of the reasons I ultimately joined.

But Toastmasters isn’t just for those who don’t speak well. It’s also for accomplished speakers. For instance, yesterday I gave a speech from one of the Advanced Communications manuals, Speaking to Inform. Each speech is a project where you work on several things. Here were the objectives I was given for this particular project:

Select new and useful information for presentation to the audience.

Organize the information for easy understandability and retention.

Present the information in a way that will help motivate the audience to learn.

And I was supposed to do this in a speech that was between five and seven minutes in length. Great objectives, a set time limit, but that’s not all. An important aspect of Toastmasters is the evaluation. The evaluation serves two purposes. The first is to give an evaluation of the speech so a speaker can improve. Second, to give another person a chance to speak in public, which an evaluator must do. Here are some of the questions that the evaluator had to answer with respect to this project:

How effectively did the speech opening capture and hold your attention?

How comfortable and familiar did the speaker appear to be with his/her material?

What was the organizational structure of the speech?

How did the speaker encourage the audience to learn?

What could the speaker have done to make the talk more effective?

What would you say is the speaker’s strongest asset in informative speaking?

Now if you’ve seen the blog posts complaining about the lack of information provided in presentation feedback, this is just the opposite. Granted, there is only one evaluator per speaker, but the evaluator has an important job. In addition, Toastmasters provides a mechanism for anyone who attended the meeting to provide feedback to the speaker, even anonymously, through tear-off sheets. Usually such feedback isn’t anonymous, because the members of a Toastmasters club are supposed to be there to help each other grow. Being forthright is part of that process.

Even if you’re an accomplished speaker, consider checking Toastmasters out. There are plenty of clubs around the world. One aspect of Toastmasters I didn’t cover is that clubs are supposed to be fun. For instance, this past meeting’s theme was on April Fool’s jokes. Introductions mentioned them, and the TMOD had plenty of informative and funny facts about April Fool’s Day and memorable April Fool’s Day pranks, like this one by Burger King from 1998.